HAVANA, Cuba August 5 - Russian Communists may be indignant. Latin
American
Communists may sing dirges and cover themselves with ashes, but Lenin is
dead,
forever. He was done in finally by reality when his life's work was put
into
practice.

The article by philosopher Enrique Ubieta "To Bury Lenin?,"
taken
from the magazine "Contracorriente" (Countercurrent) and
reproduced in
"Juventud Rebelde" (Official Organ of the Communist Youth
League) in
the July 25 issue, is an impotent lament by the philosopher as he watches
the
old Bolshevik symbols disappear, from the hammer and sickle to the mummy
on Red
Square.

Ubieta laments that "politicians and academics do not mention
Lenin's
name" and he believes there is a conspiracy of silence to discredit
what he
calls a "man-symbol" when, the way he tells it, this man-symbol
is "kept
alive by today's complex world."

Ubieta may be as much a philosopher as he wants to be, but he doesn't
seem
to live in "today's complex world" where the work
"Communism"
smells, the same way that the word "neo-liberalism" smells,
though some
haven't noticed the odor on the latter yet. Nobody likes to talk about
failure
and Bolshevik Communism has been, like its father, a complete failure.

By tomorrow, maybe no one will talk about neo-liberalism, but this
fashionable trend at least won't leave behind an obsolete symbol like the
ones
left behind by Communism.

The philosopher complains that Russians "haven't understood that
Socialism failed (in Russia) because it was embalmed." One would have
to
tell Ubieta that Leninist Socialism failed because it embalmed life, and
because
it embalmed the natural rights of men, because it was sterile.

To bury Lenin is not a bad idea. Communism survives today only
symbolically.
Two mummified symbols remain of Marxism-Leninism: Lenin's unburied corpse
and
Cuba's embalmed Revolution. It is time to bury dead symbols!

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